Alastair Cook's men will arrive as likely conquerors rather than whipping
boys, writes Simon Hughes

On Wednesday, England head off to compete for the Ashes in Australia, an assignment that was always branded ‘The Toughest Tour’. Australia’s abrasive mix of fast, bouncy pitches, muscular, merciless cricketers and acid-tongued supporters, all to be confronted under a harsh, unremitting sun, made it a job for which only the hardiest should apply. Frequently – even as recently as 2006 – England teams wilted at the challenge.

Circumstances have changed. Australian pitches have largely lost their bite – apart from the ball still springing up at your chest in Perth – tending more to scuttle around your legs. Balls searing past English batsmen’s noses and being taken 25 yards back overhead by a vociferous wicketkeeper are rare. Anyway, practically all Australia’s frontline fast bowlers are injured. Those who are still standing are being flogged all round India.

Australian batsmanship is also at a low ebb with only one player, the captain Michael Clarke, possessing a Test average higher than the mid-thirties, which is modest by today’s standards. The days when gimlet-eyed Aussie batsmen with Popeye forearms salivated over the arrival of a planeload of apprehensive Pommy pie-chuckers are gone. It is the local batsmen who are nervous now.

The Australian public, incited by coach Darren Lehman to give the England players a torrid experience, may bide their time. They are not fools. They know their team have lost seven of their past nine Tests and have not won a game in their past two series.

They know their captain is imaginative but insubstantial, an opinion echoed by the recently-retired Ricky Ponting in his autobiography. They know that the only spinners they have are a flaky offie who takes his first-class wickets at 38, and an asylum seeker from Pakistan who has yet to play a Test. They are not convinced their current horse is one to back. The biggest difference of all is that Alastair Cook’s team will arrive in Australia with respect. It is 55 years since England docked in Australia having beaten them in the previous home and away series.

The memories of England sealing the prize in 2010-11 – the first time Down Under for 24 years – with an innings drubbing at Australia’s coliseum of sport, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, will still be vivid.

Both the players and the public know that this England are no pushovers, and fear that their own team are. It is not a situation conducive to the levels of harassment that England teams have endured in the past.

What England achieved on that 2010-11 tour under the Andocracy of Strauss and Flower has created a seismic shift. It has given England great self-belief verging on invincibility and exposed alarming cracks in the Australian sporting system which everyone knows cannot be mended overnight.

It has converted an England team visiting Australia from potential whipping boys to likely conquerors.

How they achieved that shift is significant, however. Their previous campaign was meticulously planned over the preceding nine months, with extensive discussion of every aspect of touring Australia from how to handle the press, to what to do on days off – endless consultation, forensic analysis of the opposition, team bonding trips and lots of practice sessions to rehearse certain Test match scenarios.

England were on a mission to banish the embarrassments of past campaigns, and did so with great panache. They embraced everything Australia had to offer, but, buoyed by their intense preparation and a winning habit, remained, for the most part, several steps ahead. By the end it was the Aussies who were bowing to English superiority.

As the summer showed, England are still the stronger team. They have developed big-game cricket, which involves lying in wait relatively unobtrusively during a match like a dozing predator, and then leaping in for the kill when the prey’s back is momentarily turned. Man for man they are far better.

But after a busy, Ashes-dominated summer, there has not been the opportunity or the appetite for the same preparations as for the previous Australia tour. It has not been two decades since England last won the urn Down Under, so subconsciously the motivation is slightly less.

Cook has been painting sheep’s bellies on his in-laws’ farm, Stuart Broad has been doing charity work, Graeme Swann has been turning his garden shed into a cat sanctuary.

No doubt some serious practice has been undertaken, as well as the inevitable boot camp, but there will not have been quite the intensity of the previous campaign.

History warns against complacency, however. England arrived in Australia in 1958 having won three Ashes series in a row with one of the best line-ups they have ever fielded, featuring Colin Cowdrey, Peter May, Ted Dexter, Tom Graveney Trevor Bailey, Jim Laker, Fred Trueman and Brian Statham. They were trounced 4-0.

But 2013 England still have that winning habit, and Australia will most likely be exhausted after a hard-fought one-day series in India. Expect Captain Cook to conquer the Antipodes again.